10,000 B.C. (PG-13) Warner Bros. (108 min.) Directed by Roland Emmerich. With Steven Strait, Camilla Belle. Now playing in New Jersey. ONE STAR

Yabba-dabba-don't.

A granite-headed bomb from the Stone Age, the caveman epic "10,000 B.C." may not turn out to be the worst film of the year. (After all, the year is still young.) But it is an offensive waste of time and if the movie gods have mercy, it won't even go straight to DVD. It will go right to the Petrified Forest, to sit among the other prehistoric vegetation.

Directed by the extravagant, and extravagantly untalented Roland Emmerich, the story features a prehistoric hunter named D'Leh and his beloved, Evolet. They've just begun to settle down to a cozy life of mammoth stew, nit picking and potential cholera when a foreign tribe invades, and carries Evolet off.

So D'Leh and his friends follow, wooden spears at the ready.

That's not all that's wooden. The acting -- featuring the azure-eyed Camilla Belle as Evolet, and the ropy-haired Steven Strait as D'Leh -- is about as lively as knotty-pine paneling. The cast of characters features some snarling villains, an ancient matriarch named, imaginatively, Old Mother and awful narration courtesy of Omar Sharif.

There are a few nice moments, thanks to the CGI crews -- a fleet of crimson-sailed ships, a couple of mammoth stampedes, an ancient city. There's also a saber-toothed tiger the size of a bus, and giant man-eating ostriches (somehow I must have missed that diorama at the Museum of Natural History).

Making things less palatable, though, is the xenophobic subtext. Emmerich has always been a sort of crypto-reactionary -- his historical epic "The Patriot" made the American Revolution out to be nothing more than a middle-class tax revolt, while his biggest hit, "Independence Day," featured Jewish stereotypes and a score that, bizarrely, quoted from "Deutschland, Uber Alles." But "10,000 B.C." trades in even more cliches.

Not that it's the first -- beloved fantasies from the epics of Middle-Earth through the Narnia books to the recent smash "300" all cast their stories in terms of Us vs. Them, in which the Them were often swarthy foreigners. Perhaps it's a good thing that, being so badly written, "10,000 B.C." does it so artlessly and obviously.

But what are we to make of a movie in which the gentle heroes all speak perfect English and live peaceably in the North, and the Southern devils all have hooked noses and headdresses?

Or one in which even though these villains have enslaved countless tribes, none of the Africans have had the courage to fight back until our fair hero arrives to lead them?

Or one in which when this coalition of the willing does invade, they find themselves in a land of pyramids and curved daggers and foreign gods and people who "are not like us"?

I can guess what we're supposed to make of it.

Luckily for everyone, "10,000 B.C." is too stupid to be taken seriously for long. This is, after all, a movie in which men march from the Arctic to the jungle to the desert -- all within a few weeks' time. In which the villains' supreme monarch is attended by a court of effeminate blind albinos (and don't think that's not a hard job to fill.) In which our hero, before setting free a trapped saber-tooth tiger, entreats "Do not eat me when I set you free."